A new PC is born

So finally I managed to get a PC worthy of a gaming rig. It’s been a long time since I’ve been able to say that. First, a shot from before the upgrade. That’s my old PC and my iMac, sitting happily together on my desk. Ah, the memories. It’s like a silicon version of the black and white cookie.

And now, the new gear. First, a shot of my case and PSU in their boxy homes, and second a shot of my motherboard. I decided to be lazy and let the guys at the store mount the CPU and memory for me with my cooler. Saved me some time, and it was free of charge. Can’t complain about that. Lastly, a shot of the case after I installed my PSU.

After that I got pretty busy installing all the other stuff, so I didn’t take too much time to take pictures. On to the action shots.

Got the requisite “gamer in the dark” pictures accentuating my lack of sunlight exposure, and the last one has a flash on to show some details on how much I need to wipe down my glass desk. My iMac has subsequently found a home off to the right where my printer was, and the printer is on the floor waiting for a home.

It was a great bit of fun doing the build, I have to say, and it’s even better that it booted up on the first try. At some point I’m going to have to wrangle the cables a bit better, but this thing blows away what I upgraded from. Here’s a list of what went inside:

Antec Nine Hundred Ultimate Gamer Case

Intel Coreâ„¢2 Duo Processor E6600 2.4GHz w/ 4MB Cache

Zalman CNPS9700 NT Ultra Quiet CPU Cooler

Asus P5B w/ DualDDR2 800, 7.1 Audio, Gigabit Lan, SATA II, PCI-E x16

Corsair 2GB XMS2-6400 TWIN2X Dual Channel DDR2 Kit (2 x 1GB)

eVGA e-GeForce 8800 GTS 320MB PCI-E w/ Dual DVI, HDTV-Out

Seagate 320GB Barracuda 7200.10 SATA II w/ NCQ, 16MB Cache

Corsair HX 620W Modular Power Supply w/ Triple +12V

Dual Samsung SyncMaster 206BW 20in Widescreen LCD w/ DVI, 2ms, 3000:1

And no, I didn’t go with Vista on this thing (yet). No real reason to yet. :)

The Zalman’s pretty damn awesome. We’ve been having some pretty nasty hot weather, and while the temperature went up to around 50 deg C, that’s not too bad considering the entire house was boiling. It normally runs in the 30-35 degree range. I’m very impressed with it, would definitely go Zalman again for future builds.